Plenty of people can’t wait to see “42,’’ the biggest, most ambitious cinematic treatment of Jackie Robinson’s life attempted so far.

Plenty of people are also terrified of “42,’’ because of the potential for a treatment of a figure that big to go so wrong. The groups surely overlap at some points.

Thus, a suggestion to all those groups: Go see it. You won’t regret it.

Brian Helgeland, the director and screenwriter (he also wrote the scripts for “L.A. Confidential” and “Man on Fire,” among others), got the story right. Better yet, he got the life right.

Best of all, he gave Jackie Robinson a life. “42,” which opens Friday, passes on the temptation to further buff the mythology and polish the bronze statue that represents Robinson in so many minds nearly 70 years after he integrated the national pastime.

This movie portrays him, instead, as a person—an exemplary one, to be sure, but one who did exemplary things within the context of living the joys and pains of a normal human being.

In “42”—which smartly restricts itself to the 1947 season and the handful of years leading up to it—Robinson is the barrier-breaker who waded in alone (a fact presented by-the-numbers in the opening scene), but also was a young husband and new father living in a new place adjusting to situations that were unprecedented, yet terribly familiar.

The result, Helgeland said, was a depiction of “10,000 small acts of bravery that turned into one big act of bravery.” In doing so, the movie unveils example after example of incidents from Robinson’s life that are very recognizable to those who have been immersed in his story for years—and are sure to make newcomers to the full telling of his life and younger viewers recoil in shock.

Obviously, a documentary, or an R-rated film (this one is PG-13), would have been even more explicit about the things America and baseball did to Robinson. On the other hand, it would have been easy to whitewash his story—pun fully intended—or soak it in the kind of melodrama that has become cliche in fiction and non-fiction sports movies.

Helgeland decided that Robinson’s actual life was dramatic enough.

Much of the action and dialogue, he said, came straight from original sources, such as Rachel Robinson and the numerous autobiographies by those directly involved. “42” has her imprint, and Major League Baseball’s input.

Between them, the trials the game put the Robinsons through are not watered down. At worst, as with most movies like this, some scenes, characters and dialogue get rearranged for dramatic purposes. No important passage gets left out, though, or left without context.

Maybe the most important factor “42” gets right, though? Robinson is the hero.

No, that can never be assumed, not by a generation of moviegoers, especially African-American ones, numbed by a history of being reduced to supporting players in their own stories. The “Mississippi Burnings” and “Cry Freedoms” of past decades still leave scars.

That was part of the fear of “42” by many: that the A-lister in the cast was Harrison Ford, and that this was all set to become a Branch Rickey movie, with the little-known actor playing Jackie (Chadwick Boseman) becoming an afterthought.

It didn’t happen.

Ford inhabited his character—it wasn’t Han Solo or Indiana Jones playing the Dodgers’ president/GM, but a very authentic, multidimensional Rickey. He illustrated why he was the ideal mastermind of the game’s integration, without turning him into the savior and diminishing Robinson.

Robinson remained at the center of “42” at all times. Boseman pulls off both the acting and the ballplaying, never a guarantee in such a movie, in which actors often are convincing in one or the other.

Sharing the center was Rachel, played by Nicole Beharie, who should be much more of a name by now, based on her feature debut, 2008’s “American Violet.” (Her sports-flick cred: She played Ernie Davis’s girlfriend in “The Express.”) For anyone who knows Rachel Robinson only as the woman publicly keeping her husband’s legacy alive the last four decades, she’s a revelation. One sees the roots of who she is now.

The rest of the characters, for good and bad, are fleshed out as well, no easy feat considering how they’ve been fit into convenient boxes over the years. Pee Wee Reese gets to be more than the noble saint defying his upbringing; one actually gets a taste of that upbringing and how it affects him. Robinson’s racist teammates aren’t drawn cartoonishly so, and neither are his supporters.

As a bonus, a sportswriter got to play a heroic role, too: Wendell Smith, who in real life was one of a handful of writers from black newspapers who, by helping smooth Robinson’s transition, became part of the history they were covering.

The story never becomes about any of them. They evolve (at least some of them) as the movie moves forward—but they revolve around him.

Choosing to stick to the ’47 season rather than Robinson’s entire, just-as-impactful life, shouldn’t be held against the “42” filmmakers. Instead, it should be taken as an invitation for the audience to learn the rest of his story for themselves—or for another writer or director to bring that to the screen.